Scenes From One Dad’s Foxhole

Okay, so make a quick list of things you expect to be issues and/or problems with your new house. This may be easy for you. Maybe even second nature if you watch HGTV as much as Mom does. But that last time I moved How Bizarre by OMC and Fly by Sugar Ray were racing up the charts, John Elway was still a quarterback, and college interns were still interested in Slick Willie.

Anyway, make a list…take your time. I’m just spitballin’ here but I’m gonna say cracks in the drywall, maybe some grading and/or drainage issues in the yard, and probably some minor leaking issues on the roof or in the bathroom are on your list. Of course there are other issues with which to deal. Maybe your neighbors to the west are Ravens fans. Maybe the couple on the corner really likes garden gnomes. Maybe the people across the street are freaking millennials who drive a Prius and are offended by everything. Just speculating. I don’t really know what kind of neighborhood you moved into.

But one thing that we failed to include on our list was rabidly aggressive robins. At any point while you ran through the things to double check with the builder and/or house inspector did two crazy-ass belligerent robins show up? Upon taking possession of your new house whilst at the bank during your closing did it dawn on you to mention that one thing that might derail the whole deal was two avian kamikaze terrorists?

Yeah so we have two robins that have built a nest in one of the pine trees along our back property line. Normally I wouldn’t think twice about it. In fact, it is a better spot than where the robins used to try and build a nest every spring in the old house. I used to have a yearly battle with these two winged morons who insisted on building a nest on the house light right next to the front door. Every morning I’d knock down the beginnings of a nest and those two idiots would just keep building. They were like the Terminators of robins – they just absolutely would not stop! But these two robins at the new house have evidently become somewhat accustomed to having complete dominion over the backyard. A part of this misguided dominance is an exceptionally hardline stance against other robins. Particularly robins which look exactly like them and have the annoying tendency to mimic their every move. Every. Damn. Move.

But reflections in windows do that.

The brain of a bird is roughly the same size as the list of Hillary Clinton’s accomplishments as Secretary of State. And the birds behave accordingly. The day we moved in I’m down in the basement doing the things you do when you move into a new house. Unpacking boxes, moving furniture, wondering what all the bird crap and accompanying bird like markings were doing all over the patio and sliding glass door. It looked a velociraptor was trying to get through the door. Bird shaped feet marks all over the glass. So much that it obstructed your view. They’d been evidently attacking these “other” two intransigent robins repeatedly for months with no success. I’m sure it was frustrating. It was probably like attacking Donald Trump in the GOP primary. Doesn’t matter what you do, he just keeps showing up same as before.

The obvious solution to this problem is deforestation of the backyard. In gleeful disdain I dubbed this the Al Gore option. There are only five pines and a maple back there. Having some activity in the house and the installation of window blinds has helped keep these two supremely dense robins away from nearly all the windows. But not the basement slider. In fact, I met out new next door neighbor while I was out cleaning the outside of the door. Neighbor walks over, introduces himself and then starts marveling at the robins’ persistence when smashing themselves into the glass. Trading blows with the reflection over and over like Bird and Dominique in Game 7 of the ’88 Eastern Conference Semis. Then, when they aren’t hurling themselves at the glass, they sit right up against it and crap all over the patio. Which, if I’m not mistaken, is what Bernie Sanders supporters plan to do at the Democratic National Convention.

I’ve narrowed my options down to the following:

The aforementioned Al Gore option. Doomed to failure or irrelevancy like most of the things bearing Al Gore’s name.

Bob Lee Swagger Option. In a ghille suit I lay in the tall grass in the undeveloped lot behind us, check wind speed, range, target movement, barometric pressure, the number of beers left in my cooler and decide how to eliminate the target – pellet gun, pressure washer or bottle rockets. Not gonna lie, I really like the bottle rocket idea.

Total War. Here’s the plan – first, I grind up Krispy Kreme donuts and infuse the tiny donut particles into the seed in a bird feeder placed near their nest. After a couple weeks or so the birds become so fat they can’t fly. Using their sensitivity to sound against them, I play comments from Debbie Wasserman-Shultz over and over until the fat flightless birds are immobilized with liberal guilt. Pretty soon something higher up the food chain will just take care of business.